The WOSP-EFC project (water, oil, steel, paper – electrics, fire and cloth) looks at the role and capacity of materials to capture and delineate time, place and history. There are many components of this work, coming from a variety of sources ranging from an electrical conduit clamp taken out of the belly of the Enola Gay (the B59 that dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima) to the Fiat Topolino car I drove as a twenty-year-old art student, eligible as I was at the time to be conscripted to fight in the Vietnam War.

At the end of my studies, I intended driving my Topolino (little mouse) to Europe. In the 1960s it was possible to travel throughout the Middle and Far East making such journeys overland, ultimately connecting, for the Australian traveller, one hemisphere with the other. Changing conditions in the region over the last forty years and, more generally, related global economic, geopolitical and religious developments have changed the nature and conditions of travel and participation in that region, and indeed the entire globe.

Like every person’s philosophy of the world, The WOSP-EFC project is an entirely ‘author-centric’ view based on experiences, materials and images that I have come across over time. In turn, they have progressively strung together my little, grand narrative of place and being.